Holy cow, folks. We may now know what one of the root causes of developing lupus is. If you’re not familiar with this disease, it’s an autoimmune disease where your immune system attacks healthy tissues like your skin, joints, and internal organs like your kidneys. And as a famous example, in 2017, Selena Gomez had to get a kidney transplant because she has lupus. And so a study that was published recently has linked the virus Epstein bar virus or EBV which commonly causes infectious monucleiosis or mono and developing lupus. Now most people are exposed to EBV in their lifetime and many of them do not have symptoms but this virus can lay dormant in a cell of your immune system called a B cell that normally make antibodies as a part of your immune response. But when you have lupus, according to this new research, you tend to have about 25 times more of these infected B cells compared to those who don’t have lupus. Researchers then reported that these virus infected cells are reprogrammed to produce anti-uclear antibbody or ANA. These are protein tags that specifically attach to the nucleus of your cell and that can lead to destruction and damage of healthy tissues. That is the hallmark of lupus. Now there is a whole body of research to suggest that EBV also increases the risk of developing other diseases like multiple sclerosis. So it is really important that we have a better understanding of this virus because we could potentially have targeted therapeutics to look at these virus infected B cells potentially. But also, we really need a vaccine against EBV to significantly drop the risk of people developing autoimmune diseases.
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